Wizards 2021-22 Mixtape City Edition Uniform Release
On November 1st, 2021 we launched the Washington Wizards ‘Mixtape’ City Edition uniform. This uniform was a nod to two different eras of D.C. basketball: The 1970’s Washington Bullets, who won a championship in 1978, and the early to mid 2000s Wizards teams spanning from the return of Michael Jordan to the run of Gilbert Arenas, Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler.
The new uniform set also featured tributes to the most important figure in the history of D.C. basketball: Wes Unseld. Featuring his retired jersey number above the tag on the lower left hand side, as well as notes on the shorts for his MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, this jersey was a nice tribute to his legacy. Making this even more special was the fact that we had hired his son, Wes Unseld Jr., to be our head coach and he had the team off to a hot start at the time that we released the uniform.
This was my first big content plan with the Wizards, and given that uniform releases were my favorite part of my job with the Nuggets, this was something that I was incredibly excited about.
Below I’ve detailed our content and how we went about creating that content and why we chose it for our platforms.
We started our with the tweet below the night before the release. Our fans really didn’t know that this was coming at all so we felt like this would catch everyone off guard. I’ll be completely honest, this content was a surprise piece of content that our marketing video Sr. Manager sent to me as just something he’d been messing with. It wasn’t part of the original plan but once I saw it I thought that it would make for a nice tease given that it was the first time we’d used DMV in any sort of team content.
The engagement went through the roof. 750,000+ impressions, just shy of 52,000 engagements and over 100,000 media views. We really had people talking. It was perfect because the look of it went well with Halloween (the night we posted it) while also aligning with our jersey launch the next day.
Next we went with a simple small cut of the jersey. Just so we could let people know that tomorrow we would be releasing a new uniform. The ambiguous photo caused quite a bit of misdirection with our fans, with some thinking we were just completely bringing back the early 2000s uniforms and others thinking it would be something completely different. Either way, it started the conversation and had our fans talking about us on a non-gameday.
On November 1st, after retweeting the two teases from the night before, we officially started our unveil of the uniforms with a piece created by our productions department. The piece is narrated by grammy nominated rapper Pusha T who is a Wizards fan and a local legend. To get a star of that magnitude to do the voiceover for us was a huge win and we were one of the few teams to land a celebrity to help with the launch of their uniforms.
Given that it is our ‘City Edition’ it was also big for us to have a rapper that the city could connect with and get behind. D.C. is a city that is rich in culture and being able to tap in to that was a great way to connect with our audience.
Next up we had our IG carousel to describe the details of the jersey and how it all came together. This was a 6 slide carousel created by our creative team that came together quite nicely. For our city edition uniforms we unveiled a completely new brand look featuring new design elements.
If there was one thing I wish we could have done differently about this unveil, it’s that I wish we’d had a photoshoot with our veteran players in the uniforms. Due to supply chain issues (meaning the jerseys didn’t get here in time) combined with COVID protocols, it was something that didn’t happen. Nonetheless, we had already shot our two rookies in the jersey during the summer, although they aren’t in their own uniform numbers.
Telling the story of what this uniform means to the organization was something we really wanted to do and our Senior Manager of Digital Communications wrote a really nice web article that summed it all up.